I was sitting in the back of the Calvin T. Ryan Library on the University of Nebraska Kearney campus one October evening. My biology book, a behemoth olive green text, was fronting for the clandestine work of the night. Tucked inside this book was a paper back copy of Erica’s Jong’s Fear of Flying. A first person, feminist narrative, this was undoubtedly the most scandalous book I had ever read. And the fact that I was going to use it in an academic paper? Doubly scandalous–or incredibly sophomoric and stupid. Because the paper was not due for two weeks, the jury was still out.
You see, I had an idea, a burr-on-the bottom-of-your-pant-leg idea, the kind you cannot shake off no matter how hard you try. While reading the literature of plains’ women, I began to see how their struggles were not altogether unlike those of contemporary women. Would Mari Sandoz and Willa Cather hang out with the likes of Erica Jong? Would their characters eagerly confide in each other? Yes, I thought, yes.
In the end, my professor did not exactly share my passion and conviction for the idea that had ultimately spun itself into a literary comparison of Jong’s protagonist and Beret Hansa, the protagonist in Ole Rolvaag’s pioneer classic, Giants in the Earth. Although I was momentarily disappointed in the grade I received, I continued to be buoyed by the idea that had sustained me for weeks. It was, undeniably, an idea of worth. That I had yet to write it into the worth it deserved was regrettable but heroic nonetheless.
The best ideas require heroism. They demand intellectual risks that scare the bejesus out of us. They blow out the cobwebs and exhilarate us. In the end, stripped of pretense, they bring us face-to-face with what we thought we knew and what we have discovered. In the sanctuary of an idea, we can wander the earth in a moment, travel through time, live through other lives, and dream.
American novelist John Steinbeck wrote, Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple, learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. I like that. Get a few, learn how to work and live with them, and watch them multiply. As far as I’m concerned, you just cannot have enough rabbit hutches in the sanctuary of ideas. If you build a dozen, you will need a dozen more.
Years ago, I held a creative writing workshop for children. In a writing warm-up exercise, I asked a group of fifth graders to quickly fill in the blank: too many ___ are dancing on the _____. In true standardized test fashion, they responded: too many dancers are dancing on the stage–right? I mourned the fact that these kids had vacated the sanctuary of ideas, settling, instead, into the safety of right answers. Until I met with the first graders. I posed the same question and held my breath as they responded: too many moons are dancing on the water. Hallelujah! We were going to need more rabbit hutches.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart understood what it was like to be in the sanctuary of ideas:
When I am. . . completely myself, entirely alone. . . or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these ideas come I know not nor can I force them.
Who can measure the worth of ideas that flowed from the man into the world’s most sublime music? And does it matter how and from where these ideas came? In the sanctuary of ideas, it matters only that they came–and came abundantly.
Tonight, as I rue the fact that sleep will come too slowly, that I will be unable to keep one idea from impregnating another and yet another, I will take solace in the sanctuary of ideas where I can commune with other late-night thinkers.
